Congratulations to all the competition Winners

Winning writers and their work

Competition details

First prize (£150) Abigail Ottley

Second prize (£75) K.S. Dearsley

Third prizes (£15) Jessica Boatright, Patricia Ottley, Neil Douglas

Highly commended Robin Gilbert, Simon Andrew Halford

Longlisted Joanna Miller, Kate Young, Lorraine Collins, Nigel Speight, Sharon Webster, Theresa Gooda

All of these writers are represented in the 2024 Anthology and their work can be read and heard by clicking on this link.

Lead judge Katherine Parsons writes and speaks:

‘Remember the Air’ is a real diamond of a piece, holding a world within its page. Turning it over reveals its many facets, in turns both beautiful and disturbing. The balanced composition of this piece is equally impressive and moving, and sets a high standard for what can be done in 150 words.

‘Sightseeing’ takes a quite different approach, setting out a tiny fragment of rural life and letting the reader enter, just for a moment. The narrator’s gaze becomes a window through which we witness these few precious moments until, in the final line, we are once more excluded.

‘Softening the loss’ gorgeously depicts the systematic kissing of every leaf of a tree before they are all lost to winter. Its title gestures out to the metaphorical expansiveness of this image, which is held beautifully throughout the piece.

‘The Birds That Came to Stay’ is another great example of the use of natural imagery, brilliantly bookended: the narrator first remembers a waxed-cotton dress for its patterns of flowers and leaves; the piece ends with their imagined transformation into pieces small enough for birds to fly away with.

‘Deep in June’ approaches flash fiction as a more traditional mode of short fiction storytelling and precisely matches the form to its content, revealing its plot in much the same fashion as the fur coat dropped in the final few lines. 

The winning writers are all in this anthology, linked to their work

Abigail Ottley, Jessica Boatright, Joanna Miller, K. S. Dearsley, Kate Young, Lorraine Collins, Neil Douglas, Nigel Speight, Patricia Hamilton, Robin Gilbert, Sharon Webster, Simon Andrew Halford, Theresa Gooda

indicates one audio of a story created by the writer.  

Theresa Gooda

Also-rans

Sylvia left school at 14, preterm, to look after her brothers when her mother died. Too soon she qualified in caring – and quickly became bogged down in domesticity.
Pat, conversely, 11-plussed it to the local Grammar where the masters mostly ensured an education in shame, though he managed to overcome the worst of his stammer while hitting the books.
Quick with numbers, skilled in budgeting on nothing, Sylvia blagged a betting shop job calculating accumulators. Pat was a gambler, quick with figures from long hours of algebraic equations.
They met across the smoky bookies’ counter when he took a punt each-way in the three o’clock at Ascot.
She dreamed of freedom while he contemplated graduation.
Neither factored a child before they were out of the starting stalls. They rented a tiny flat together – with hurdles – where the going was never good.  Simple maths that neither could solve.        
Dead heat.

Theresa Gooda is a poet and playwright and the ghostwriter of a series of bestselling memoirs published by Mirror Books, Thrown Away Children. The ninth book, Marilyn’s Story, was published in May 2024. She is the current Chair of West Sussex Writers, and has been a teacher for 27 years.

Simon Andrew Halford

Dollies

Read by Marilyn Timms

Without you, pain is everything. A burning from the inside out.  An itch I can’t scratch, no matter how hard I try. So I turn to you: my dollies. I take you to be my champion: Sir Tramadol: my knights in plastic armour, my sweet guardians in yellow and green; an army of small soldiers sent into battle on my behalf, bringing your own brand of misery, keeping me awake.  
Me. A damsel in this dress: backless and temporary, until they let me out.  You take your time (and mine too). Your touch is much colder than it was.  Feeling feint. The past: a blur. The future…uncertain. I let go of the present as they, the pushers of pills and keepers of keys, swing by to finally dim the lights.
As everything fades – even the pain – I put you under my pillow and hold on tight ‘til morning.  

Just Speak

Read by Marilyn Timms

Our house remains silent when the door goes. He comes home. First the stairs, then another door closes. Shut in/out/down. Hungry to know more, we knock and listen for signs of life, our doors open, invitation extended with bated breath:
‘Log off. Come down. Eat. Don’t consign yourself to this crash diet of CoD, Fortnite and Twitch. Take your eyes off the screen. There’s plenty of space. Invade us, Please. Let us in… Lash out. We can take it away.’ 
A head appears later on, arms loaded with dirty clothes and him lost beneath. I remind him where the washing machine lives. As he huffs and puffs and rolls his eyes the whole house shakes, caught up in this familiar spin cycle.
He shuffles off, our phantom son, looting cupboards and ransacking snack drawers. He takes enough supplies to see him through another late night while we settle for takeaway.

Simon Halford is a writer, poet and former English teacher living in Bedfordshire. His PhD Thesis on the Horror genre was previously published by McFarland. He’s currently submitting his first novel D: Tales that Matter to agents and publishers whilst working on the second in his A Single Letter series.

Sharon Webster

There are things
There are things I need to tell you, but I will not, not yet.
I will place myself instead on the edge of your ramblings and we will move homewards as we always do. And I will look surprised and outraged appropriately and you will giggle.
I will concentrate on the puddles and the blue sky, see only the leaves as they spiral from the trees, and your yellow wellies with the navy trim.
I will try not to warble when I speak.
I will try not to let my eyes leak.
For in my pocket is an image of a man. He has your eyes, your hair, your smile. I cradle it, hold it tightly between my fingers.
You belong to this man and so do I.
That is what your father saw today, and now he is gone, and our lives are changed forever.

Sharon Webster writes mainly short fiction and poetry and in recent years has had some success with inclusion in local anthologies and online. Her first anthology ˋShadows and Daisies was published by Tim Saunders Publications in 2023.

Robin Gilbert

Brief encounters

Yesterday, at the bus stop, he stood beside me – a man without a shadow. Today, it was a shadow without a man. 

The shadow cleared his throat and asked politely when the No. 10 was due. “It should be here soon,” I replied and, equally politely, enquired whether he knew the man without a shadow.  The shadow shrugged. “He may be on the bus,” the shadow said, “if, that is, he hasn’t already left for Margate.” 

The No. 10 drew in, and out stepped the man without a shadow.  He and the shadow went off together, volubly discussing Dante and the death of kings.

Robin Gilbert has published two poetry collections, My Own Dragon (2006) and DaDa & the Dark Lady (2012) and had modest success in competitions, but this is his first and only venture into flash fiction. From 2013 to 2019, he was co-Director of the Cheltenham Poetry Festival.

Patricia Hamilton

I Just Flicked

Wearing the most outlandish clothes, my hair dyed blue and cut way too short, I was excited to win a prize for a canvas depicting my mother’s breasts; the same breasts I’d caught sight of through a crack in the rickety bathroom door.
After that, I lost interest in painting autumn trees with half-dead leaves clinging on. Why don’t they just let go?
Selecting the paintbrushes took hours, as if that would make any difference, but what colour were her breasts?
Bright orange for her firstborn, or sometimes more subdued. Brown for the mud on my big brother’s football boots. Blue for her youngest; cool and academic. And for me . . .
I just flicked; throwing paint at my mother’s breasts.

The Birds That Came to Stay

My mother once made me a dress from waxed-cotton; a new summer dress, no sleeves. It was pomegranate colour with tiny primrose flowers, and deep-green leaves. I remember it so well. But I don’t need a new summer dress. I need a new hat to stop the birds escaping. Some of them are tiny, no trouble at all, but others puff up their feathers; peck the meat from my bones, and squawk so loudly.
I must quieten them and keep them under my hat. I could say I don’t know how they got there, but that would be a lie. Sometimes I think . . . if I feed them enough, they’ll grow strong enough to fly away with me. They’ll take strands of my hair in their beaks, and off we’ll go.

Patricia Hamilton. From juvenile poems, to song lyrics and play scripts for her published musicals, Patricia has always had a lively relationship with words. She has been shortlisted for the Bridport, and other poetry competitions, but prose poetry using only 150 words is, for her, an entirely new departure.

Nigel Speight

The Ally

It all began with invitations.
On holiday, last summer, as he watched sea foaming at the mouth around a ferry, he distinctly heard a weird,
“Lean right over. Kiss me. Taste my salty tongues.”

Back home, at the station, air slammed by a train expressing through left, “Try again tomorrow. Just the next step!” in the wind.
Walking there every morning, as he crossed the bridge, a whisper wafted up his way, gently suggesting,
“Jump.”
Then on his way home, as the nights drew in, a face began unfading and a fog body gradually condensed: grey skin; black hole eyes; rusty claws, waiting, hunched, on the rail.
At first it was indifferent, just preening its feathers as he passed. But then its gaze transfixed him and pierced his very soul. And its volume quickly swelled to:
“JUMP!!”
And so, enraged, he swung to shove it off and, pushing nothing, fell.

Nigel Speight is a journalist (football!), who was a teacher (Head of English) and is now a Church Administrator. He has dabbled in poetry since he was a teenager and especially loves writing it when he should be doing something else.  A few have been published. Competition wins? Just the one! 

Neil Douglas

Deep in June the dogwood rose has forgotten to bloom

as she arrives for her check-up fifteen minutes early, anxious, in an ankle length fur coat that is the talk of the waiting room. But for me, no cause for concern if the fur is real or fake. And for goodness’ sake, no interest what she is wearing underneath on the hottest day this century as she slips out a bare arm for the encircling cuff which tightens around her bicep. The machine puffs, wheezes, to its satisfactory measurement. No alarm when she tells me the coat is a gift from him.
But should it concern me that when she stands to leave, she allows the coat to fall from her frame, to collapse on my tiled carpet revealing his other gift ‒ the raw welts, callous bruises, that grace her pale body but always, always, spare her face?

Undescended

Hypochondriac? We don’t use that term now. We call them heartsinks. He is a heartsink ‒ curator of foul moods. Late for his appointment he rants, face magenta, fists hammering the desk at reception. Clara, our homeopath, calms him. She reminds him of his dead mother.

‘The doctor will see you now.’ He struts the corridor to my consulting room.

‘How can I help?’ I say.
‘I have one ball’, he says. ‘Born that way’, he says. ‘Too busy to tell you before – meetings, rallies, some time away.’
‘How is your sex life? Your last partner?’
‘She fell. Out of a window.’
‘Trousers off, underpants down. Hop up on the couch.’ I palpate his abdomen, groin.
‘Stand up, turn your head, cough.’
All present and correct on the left but his right scrotum is empty.
A puzzle how this man, so tightly packed with rage, has become half full.

Neil Douglas is a retired GP/ Community Paediatrician who has recently graduated with an MA in Creative and Life Writing from Goldsmiths, University of London. His work has previously been commended and featured in Frosted Fire competitions. He is currently working on a first pamphlet.

Lorraine Collins

In the Scrabble Dictionary there are 42 Words that End with RAIN.

“That’s it, double points on my last go! I win!” She sat back triumphantly.
Her husband added up the scores. “Hmm, I’ll get even next time!” His eyes started to close.
“Why don’t you lie down for a bit? I’ll clear away.”
She folded the board, looked at his remaining tiles: R.A.I.N.
She remembered when he got multigrain on a triple, 36 points.
“It’s all about the endings,” he’d smirked.
Another time, she added her brain to his bird on a double, 28 points.
“Gotcha!” she’d laughed.
From the day they met more than sixty years ago, everyone agreed they were so well matched.
She had no idea that this day would be their last.
She still keeps the scorepad by the telephone, next to his special pen.
Then she could make believe their game wasn’t finally over.

Lorraine Collins’s family tell her she is a woman of many words so she enjoys the challenge of writing in a few! She considers herself a novice flash writer and has had some modest competition success which motivates her to keep going. Her happy place is anywhere her campervan takes her.

Jessica Boatright

Softening the Loss

We lounge underneath the amber leaves of our nearly sleeping tree. Cupping hot
pockets of homemade soup, we check the instructions we inherited from your father
(not quite admitting to each other that they’re burnt into memory).

When autumn turns her leaves to gold
kiss each one with new red lipstick
to keep her heart sweet through winter

Dusk draws near. We unwrap our feet, bare them to the soil beneath her bark. I
apply a deep rouge lipstick, press my lips together hard. You put up a long silver
ladder. The clock ticks over to golden hour and I climb, beginning the kissing with
silence sitting comfortably on my shoulder.

You sketch our tree lightly on your hand, making a map of where she’s been kissed,
the leaves still waiting.

Once it is over, her branches embrace me, holding me like a true friend.

Jessica Boatright is a writer based in Lincolnshire. Her writing has been published in Good For Her (Prismatica Press), Full House Literary, Visual Verse, Marble and Sarasvati Magazine, among others. She placed in Flight of the Dragonfly’s ‘Comfort Zone’ competition. Jessica is part of the Writing East Midlands Momentum scheme.

Kate Young

Crash

The curtains were closed when we heard it. Squealing brakes, scrape, bang! We peeped to see an awkward halt in the stream of traffic. Hazard lights winked.
People gathered. A dazed man exited the front car and opened the back passenger doors. There was no movement within. The street held its breath.
A fender-bender is a few moments’ entertainment, but no-one wants to witness a fatal accident at dinner time.
The rear car was moved off the road. The helpers peered into the front car, then stepped back murmuring. Around them, traffic started moving – drivers now focused on getting home for Sunday roast.
Blue lights arrived. Paramedics swiftly pulled out the back-seat victims – but state-of-the-art medical equipment will do no good.
Two potted palms lay smashed, roots severed, whip lashed leaves curling dramatically on the tarmac in the dying light.

Kate Young is a former journalist based in Isle of Wight. She was highly commended in the Hastings International Poetry Competition 2002 and won the Isle of Wight Literary Festival 2012 flash fiction competition. Her novella featured in The Paul Cave Prize for Literature 2023 anthology. She works for the charity MAD-Aid.

K. S. Dearsley

A Family Resemblance

The waiter approached the young woman with the baby buggy. Beneath the bonnet was a cold black nose and hairy muzzle.
“No dogs allowed!” he said.
The mother laughed. “It’s the family resemblance. Charlie takes after his grandma. What big eyes you’ve got, Charlie… “
The waiter interrupted. “You’ll be telling me your name’s Little Red Riding Hood next.”
“See for yourself. Here’s Grandma now, with Charlie’s daddy.”
A sprightly, grey-haired lady waved to her as she entered. The waiter turned back before the door swung shut on the man following her.
“She looks nothing like your baby–dog,” he corrected himself.
The mother’s eyes widened. “But everyone sees the likeness, don’t they, darling?”
The waiter turned. Behind him stood a wolf in a sheepskin coat–it was all rough grey fur and teeth–lots of teeth.
“That’s right,” he growled. “Charlie’s the image of his grandma!”

Sightseeing

Our last night; time for one final look at the sea. The arch of a sand-chariot sail frames the sunset. We stop and stare, then walk homewards. The light fades as the street narrows and becomes a lane flanked by bramble and elder hedges studded with hawthorn. The bulk of a lone cow looms, keeping a silent tryst with a late moon.
It grows darker, the kind of night sky an urban dweller never sees. The horses in the next field are cantering, swerving around the banks and ditches as if practising for the next gymkhana. Only white blazes and grey rumps are visible.
Jack turns on the torch and the rhythmic vibrations through our feet skid to a halt as the horses stop. All heads turn our way. They stare as if to say: “Hey, did you see that?” Then they turn away.

K. S. Dearsley’s fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous publications, including The Binnacle Ultra-shorts and SlingInk. Her novel, Discord’s Shadow, the third in The Exiles of Ondd series, is available on Amazon at http://www.tinyurl.com/exiles-of-ondd. Find out more at http://www.ksdearsley.com

Joanna Miller

Sphagnum

Read by Marilyn Timms

Here is the moss, bright green. They’re gathering on the wild moor, bringing in the healing harvest. Their hands numb with cold, eyes stinging, and noses running. She clutches her willow basket, sliding in the mud, soaked skirt dragging heavy behind her. Gathering for him, her brothers, and all the broken men. The fierce wind bites her face, whipping her hair into long streamers.
From the hospital, he looks out to the vast stretch of moorland and its shifting shadows, watching her come to him.  All through the purple hues of autumn and the chill of winter, she’s been there.  By his side when the screams woke him, and the stench of gangrene made him retch.  Soothing his cries, tending his wounds, changing the sodden sheets, his nurse and protector. 
Now an emerald haze lights the valley, and the healing will take him from her.

Joanna Miller lives in Derbyshire with her partner, dogs, and a grumpy cat. Retirement has given her more time to practise writing, and she focuses on flash and short fiction. She is particularly inspired by people and places. Joanna was longlisted for the Edinburgh Award for Flash Fiction 2021.

Abigail Ottley

Remember the air

in that far-flung country. It’s precious. Try to remember. Even as the gun is raised, its barrel glossy with new oil. Recall the vast, dizzy sky, flashing blue then gold, in the instant of the forestock’s alignment. Remember grass smelling green and the garden rich and earthy, remember playing hide-and-seek and two-balls, hopscotch and handstands, dragonflies and maybugs, ladybird spots in a jar, daisy-crowns and how, if you like butter, a buttercup will light up your chin. Remember too, in the moment before falling, this muzzle is a cold winter finger. See how it obtrudes its rigid finger, commanding, cajoling, persuasive as a lover, caressing the curve of your zygomatic bone under the black gape of your eye. Remember the air in that country you are leaving, how it was scented by white lilacs. Remember Nana’s warning, how she always told you bad luck follows lilacs indoors.

Abigail Ottley’s poetry and short fiction has been widely published in journals and anthologies. She was second the Plaza Prose Poem Competition 2024 and Commended and twice long-listed in What We Inherit From Water, her debut collection will be published by Yaffles Nest in the spring of 2025. Abigail lives in Penzance.